This Is Us
Weight Loss Surgery and the Unbearable Thinness of Being
I learned the quiet heartbreak of losing someone who truly understood what it meant to live in a body like mine
I was 18 the first time I met a fat sister in arms. It was my first semester of college, and we immediately gravitated toward one another, buoys in the choppy waters of an unfamiliar sea.
That year, we became closer than either of us expected. Both of us had been the fattest kids in our high school classes, held at a distance from classmates by virtue of our bodies. We’d both hoped college would be easier, but most of the time, it felt familiar. The desks weren’t built for us. Classmates stared openly at our bellies and thighs. Lengthy diet talk among our peers, bemoaning the fat on their slight frames, 100 pounds lighter than our own. Professors’ penchants for using obesity as a metaphor for capitalism and excess. Our bodies were always unwelcome and never our own, a symbolic stand-in for some epidemic or a terrifying future.
In the face of all that, we made a radical decision: We decided to like each other, and we decided to like ourselves. We became two of the few fat people who no longer feared our own skin. We were alone in it together, and we were so gloriously free…
